The Languages of Edison's Light (review)

The Languages of Edison's Light. By Charles Bazerman (Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1999) 416 pp. $39.50.

In this book, Bazerman applies the tools of rhetorical analysis to one of the best known innovations in the history of technology, Thomas Edison's electric light. Bazerman uses Edison's light to demonstrate that technological change always involves the production of meanings as well as material artifacts. His analysis focuses on the communicative processes involved in Edison's self-conscious efforts to shape the meaning of the electric light.

The electric light is a good choice for two reasons. First, it is among the most famous and thoroughly studied inventions in modern his- tory. Second, the microfilm edition of the Edison papers provides a massive and well-indexed collection of primary sources related to the invention. Although Bazerman draws freely from the extensive secondary literature, the primary sources provide the principal grist for his rhetorical mill. Using these sources, Bazerman persuasively demonstrates that modern technologies are thoroughly embedded in a network of texts.

Bazerman is tilling well-plowed historical ground; Edison scholars are unlikely to find any major surprises. Other historians have noted Edison's careful management of the public image of the light, among them Friedel and Israel, whose book remains the definitive account of Edison's invention.¹ What Bazerman adds to their work is an emphasis on the centrality of Edison's rhetorical work to the process of invention. In particular, Bazerman highlights Edison's brazen manipulation of the press, including gifts of stock to friendly reporters. This manipulation was especially crucial at the beginning of Edison's work on the lamp, when he announced to the popular press that he had solved the problem of the incandescent light. In fact, he had come up only with the germ of an idea, one that later proved unworkable. Nevertheless, credulous newspaper reports helped Edison secure backing for his project from some of the nation's leading financiers. It took another year of intensive effort before Edison emerged with a workable solution, the carbon-filament lamp.

Bazerman goes far beyond Edison's relationship with the popular press. He examines the communicative side of Edison's work in multiple discursive systems, including patent law, finance, urban politics, the technical press, and communications inside the laboratory itself. Bazerman demonstrates how the meaning of the electric light and Edison's rhetorical strategies varied in each discursive system. Bazerman argues correctly that a successful invention needs to establish itself within multiple discursive communities.

This book is the first major attempt to make rhetorical analysis relevant to the history of technology. Overall, the book succeeds admirably, but like all first attempts, it has weaknesses. The last section, which focuses on events after Edison's launch of the Pearl Street Station in 1882, is not as strong as the rest of the book. More important, Bazerman may have made a strategic error in keeping theory in the background until the conclusion. Perhaps he was trying to make the book more accessible to historians of technology, who tend to be averse to theory. But, without the theory, Bazerman's account differs little from other narratives of Edison's invention, except in emphasis. Bazerman does bring one aspect of theory to the foreground in a fascinating analysis of patents as speech acts, but readers unfamiliar with speech-act theory will find the discussion hard to follow. Theoretically inclined readers may want to read the conclusion first. Also useful for framing the book is a recent article by Bazerman that distinguishes his approach in this book from his earlier work on the rhetoric of science.²

Finally, Bazerman could have posed more sharply some of the critical questions involved in the analysis of technology as a system of meaning. For example, the relationship between the rhetoric of technology and its materiality remains largely untouched, even though he insists that "ultimately . . . the technology must be physically realized if...